“Another entry from the authoritarian handbook,” says David Axelrod. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes thinks it’s a “hunt” for “ideological subversives.” The public is financing “lies” to “eviscerate environmental protections,” according to Robert Reich.
Liberals accuse their adversaries of fascism pretty regularly these days, so you likely have no idea what is worrying these lefty grandees. To be specific: Over the weekend the New York Times published a story about the Environmental Protection Agency hiring a public relations firm to investigate “agency employees who have been critical of the Trump administration.” A vice president of the firm, Definers Public Affairs, explains it to the Times straightforwardly: they were asked to look into whether EPA employees “were emailing critical things about the agency on government time and how frequently they were corresponding about this.”
In order to discover if employees were engaging in “resistance” activities on the clock, Designers submitted Freedom of Information requests to the agency about the employees. In other words, rather than simply fire or demote employees who undermine the agency’s leadership, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt’s team sought to document the times when these activities took place while the employees were at work.
There is no scandal here. The lawfully appointed head of an agency has every right to find out if employees are actively undercutting his mission and getting paid to do so. Pruitt is loathed by the environmental militants inside the EPA (to understand why, read Fred Barnes’s feature story in the December 25 WEEKLY STANDARD). The use of FOIA requests is an open and lawful way to deal with those who aren’t simply voicing legitimate policy differences but actually impairing the agency’s director. Definers only used public information to file its requests, not internal documents (an important point ignored by the Times in both the original story and a follow-up). That Pruitt’s team dealt with the problem of internal opposition not by secret purges but by use of open-records requests shows a reverence for transparency and the rule of law. If an “authoritarian” regime wanted to “hunt down ideological subversives,” it wouldn’t use FOIA requests. It would just fire them.
The Times is viscerally hostile to Pruitt, and it is hardly surprising that one of its reporters would find a scandal where there is nothing of the sort. Surely a reporter who claims in his Twitter bio that “transparency matters a lot to me” might have stopped to consider this obvious point. But for our paper of record, too often “transparency” only matters when it yields the right kind of political results.
Update 12/19/17: After this editorial was posted, we received this note from Joe Pounder of Definers Public Affairs: “Definers is working with the EPA to provide media clipping services so that the agency team can stay on top of the ever changing news cycle. America Rising is a separate entity that FOIAd the EPA after public reports back in the spring.”
